Thursday, 4 March 1999

Risky fun highlights Chamber Festival

By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star

This year's Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival has reached its midpoint, with two concerts remaining this weekend. But success stories are already emerging.

For starters, the unknown, riskier works sandwiched between more familiar fare have worked splendidly.

On Sunday, that meant four movements of jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis' ``At the Octoroon Balls'' (1995). The work, which takes its name from a New Orleans tradition, is about to be released on a Sony CD. It was written for the Orion String Quartet, the festival's anchor ensemble that performed it on Sunday.

Though this is Marsalis' first foray into the string quartet, the composer studied Beethoven's 16 string quartets intensively during his student days at New York's Juilliard School.

That knowledge - and the suggestions the Orion gave him - have paid off handsomely in fresh bursts of fine idiomatic writing, much of it drawing on jazz-inflected rhythms and harmonies.

A joyful, solo-filled rag concluded the affair, but my favorite movement was the Hellbound Highball, which mimicked the sounds of whistle-blowing trains riding the rails. What fun.

The other successfully played risk was Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet (1976). The musicians were violinists Ida Kavafian and Todd Phillips, violist Steve Tenenbom, cellist Peter Rejto and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott.

The five made this morbid, sound-effect-filled work flow by with relentless, unsettling intensity. The quarter-tone-flavored string passages came to sound like discordant sirens. And McDermott took one repeated note on a journey of dynamic changes that seemed to have no limit.

The middle waltz sounded appropriately crazed.

Another success story at the festival has been clarinetist Jon Manasse, a frequently heard chamber musician and the principal of the American Ballet Theater Orchestra and the New York Chamber Symphony.

Make no mistake about it: This cat can play the licorice stick. Teaming up with two stellar players - cellist Rejto and pianist Ralph Votapek - he graced Brahms' Clarinet Trio, Sunday's opener.

In the trio, the clarinet is a more egalitarian member, sharing the solo spotlight with the cello. But in the Clarinet Quintet, heard last night with the Orion, the clarinet takes a far more virtuoso role.

Manasse took full advantage, capturing the rhapsodic qualities of the second movement's note-clogged licks and playing with great sensitivity throughout. How nice, for instance, to hear dolce sound sweet.

In addition, Dvorák's Viola Quintet, performed on Sunday, also sounded spectacular. It featured the Orion and violist Ida Kavafian.

In last night's Piano Quartet by Fauré, violinist Benny Kim, violist Paul Neubauer, cellist Rejto and pianist Votapek uncovered the music's strong pulse and sweetly lyrical legato. But the piece took far too long to make its points.